What Americans Should Know About European Campaigns – Juri Schnöller (Cosmonauts & Kings)

Juri Schnöller:

Most people say, Look, this kind of hyper polarized political debate, we don't wanna have that in Europe.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Today we're joined by my friend Yuri Schneller, all the way from Berlin of Comans and Kings Germany's premier digital political communications agency. He's worked on campaigns for the likes of German Chancellor on Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Yoker. Yuri is at the cutting edge of innovation and EU politics and has also recently launched his own software platform. Civical. In our conversation, we talk about the differences between US campaigns and European campaigns, what he's learned from the US 2022 midterms and how he drives innovation in German politics. Yuri, you've been involved in political campaigns around Europe and you watch campaigns very closely in the us. What's a difference between European and American campaigning that only a professional might appreciate?

Juri Schnöller:

First of all, what American campaigners often focus most of their time on, of course for those who are listening is email list building, fundraising, and the entire let's say, campaign machine is mostly built around mobilization and expanding your list in order to increase the fundraising that is required to meet your mobilization goals. And I think in European campaigning, it's much more about creating awareness and attention in the first place. And since we have a very strict regulation when it comes to campaign funding and campaign fundraising and entire need for money in politics, therefore most of, let's say our professional time is spent on creating the public image of the candidate, but also in terms of rallying your party base and then trying to invent and come up with formats that ultimately get you in a dialogue, dialogue with the voters, dialogue with potential new communities. And ultimately, of course, as well get out to vote. That's pretty similar. But to cut it short, I'd say the two major differences is that fundraising and list building and everything around that and mobilization is of much less importance than it is in the US in most campaigns.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, I think a big difference too is party discipline. So the role of the political party is much more significant in Europe than it is in the United States because they have are much more involved in messaging. And in these parliamentary systems, it's all about who your leader's going to be and making them chancellor or prime minister, whatever the case may be.

Juri Schnöller:

Absolutely an important point because if you kind of break with party lines, especially with key messaging you might even get excluded out party funding system, which I think in the US is probably kind of unthinkable. And even running, let's say your own corporate identity when it comes to coming up with your own social media stuff, it's kind of important, especially in the federal elections, that you stick with the party CI and don't create something completely out of the box. And in all, you can definitely say that the main strategies are shaped much more by the campaign HQ of the parties. And if you compare it to the DNC or the RNC, where of course the focus is quite different than European campaign.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, for example, you probably campaigns in Europe would not have their own logos in the way that they do in the United States

Juri Schnöller:

And Oh no. Although we see, of course one big trend that of course the digitization of politics has also spread over Europe, of course is the ization, right? That candidates become more and more important and political parties tend to be less important. But one small anecdote I have in German politics, of course the media has always reporting when the new campaigns are revealed. It's kind of odd because media, so television reporters come together and the Secretary general of the party presents a poster like a <laugh>, an offline poster, and they show, Look, this is our slogan, this is what it looks like. So it's kind of an anachronistic old ancient tradition that of course billboards are still by far and that compared to the US where TV spending of course still remains by far the largest spending bracket in all campaigns in Europe and especially in Germany. That's still the old good fashioned traditional billboard you will see on the side of the road where your candidate smiles at you.

Eric Wilson:

And I will say that design does take a front seat in a lot of these campaigns, and I think the design in Europe is a much greater focus and as a result, more polished.

Juri Schnöller:

Yeah, absolutely. I can agree on that. And it's even to the point that you would say where I know that in US campaigns a lot of focus is built around get out to vote <affirmative>. It's also of course the internal focus, as you rightly said at the beginning, that you have the party members, which are different than of course like registered voters as Democrats or Republicans, that they need to, let's say, be motivated to really go out and push and rally for your candidate. So that often is an own focus theme of let's say mobilization tactics because the social demographics of the party members differ very much from the average social demographics of the overall general population.

Eric Wilson:

And you touched on this a little bit, Yuri, but the biggest challenge I see, and I guess the brick wall that I run into when I'm trying to help translate American style tactics to the rest of the world is you have GDPR in the eu. I just recently learned that it's got this other amazing name in German which it's one word, I won't try and say it, but you have to get explicit opt-in permission to receive marketing communications. And that applies to political campaigns as well. So how does that change digital campaigning in Europe?

Juri Schnöller:

Yeah, so for the drinking game, to all the listeners out there, if you can say that for Aung you will definitely get a ER bomb at the next bar. <laugh> <laugh>, the German word for gdpr. We love to come up with fancy, complicated names. And yeah, as you said, mean it has, it's gotten to the point that it's very tricky for campaigns to operate in a field where you can call yourself data driven. It's been very restricted. I mean, it's similar in US, of course social media platforms have heavily regulated the usage of political ads on a net platform. But also in terms of let's say external data it's quite tricky because you need explicit consent from a voter or from a user of course, to use their data for any kind of targeting perspective. So whenever you ask someone to sign up for a list, you need double opt-in authentication.

And that often leads to the effect, of course, people sign up for something, but they just don't confirm that what they've subscribe to and at least to the fact of course that personalized messages in campaigns or in app community engagement is very low. And there are just a couple of, let's say, best practices in Europe from parties that have managed to create either an in app community that managed to be built offsite, Facebook or others. And if you go to the platforms I, if you talk about TikTok or LinkedIn, it's basically impossible to run any kind of personalized messaging due to GDPR regulations.

Eric Wilson:

So just to give a really concrete example to our US listeners, you can't take a voter file if you were in Europe, you couldn't take a voter file, the list of registered voters and then upload that to Facebook as a custom audience because you do not have those voters explicit opt-in permission to use that data in that way. Is that right?

Juri Schnöller:

That is right. And if you actually would do that or anything close to that, I mean, we don't have the concept of a voter file in a US sense. Of course you have let's say micro data in terms of social demographics of very narrow down villages or cities, but not down to the street level where you say, Look, this is where someone lives who voted Democrat or voted Republican. We don't have that due to our history. Of course, Germany is very restrictive by far in Europe in terms of usage of personalized data in politics. So you can do that and you even let's say, can't just use data or personalized data points. If I would have your smartphone data and I would like to upload it, I would need to your explicit consent that I would use your data in order to create a personalized message. So you need to give your explicit consent and every time, and therefore most parties actually yeah, just don't do that because it's way too complicated to adapt always the new consent regulations. And so our focus is much more on general overall brand and narrative building than personalized micro-targeting.

Eric Wilson:

Got it. So your digital campaigns are designed to just reach everyone. You wouldn't have specific messages for specific audiences.

Juri Schnöller:

I mean, of course there's a specific running, for instance ads or messages targeted to people that have potentially background in non German model language or like of course young first time voters and so on. But that's about it. It's more the raw rough brackets of social demographics and not tailored down any kind of psychographic modeling, which of course also the whole narrative of Cambridge Analytica rightly so, played a huge role in Germany by condemning any kind of, let's say psychographic use that might be misused in a context that people just simply don't know what kind of data is being used to tailor our message around their hidden desires or needs.

Eric Wilson:

And I do see here in the United States, we have in California sort of a GDPR light and I think you're gonna continue to see this shift happen in the United States, unclear if it's also going to affect politics or just commercial, but certainly the platforms are enforcing some changes as well. I wanna shift back you into the US midterms and having watched those from abroad, what has been your biggest takeaway of something you'd like to try on your campaigns?

Juri Schnöller:

So I think one thing that definitely for American listeners and for those potentially looking to the business in Europe has changed is that European campaigns when we look to the US is definitely that we look very interested towards the creative approach of creating new formats in terms of creating dialogues and potentially of course attention on all kinds of platforms, drawing people to the programs or the candidate. But the overall message has become, of course, much more polarized and much more hysterical in terms of language potentially in both sides I would say, where most people say, Look, this kind of style of politics, where in Obama times in the past years, it was always wow cutting edge technology fantastic campaign ads and videos. And for this time, most people say, Look, this kind of polarized political debate, we don't wanna have that in Europe simply also because of pac, as you rightly said at the beginning, we are not a two-party system.

We have multipolar multi-party parliamentary systems, and therefore political parties at the end of the election are required to get back on the table, negotiate a deal, and actually manage to get into a coalition. How you're supposed to do that if you call your political opponent an enemy of the people or something where they would say they definitely come, don't come back. In short, I think this time in the midterms, it was very interesting to see how candidates also in smaller tickets managed to create a lot of creative content with small budget. I mean there are a lot of good examples where I think it was very interesting to see how they used social in order to create attention and to get out the word but in terms of I would say tech, technological innovation, there wasn't much where you would say, This is definitely going to be groundbreaking this or next year in Europe and what we can from that.

Eric Wilson:

Right. And so you touched on this a little bit. A lot of our listeners will be wondering about what's next as our midterms are over, but just wait around for a little bit because the presidential election is about to kick off. But I know a lot of listeners are interested in working internationally, and so I'm curious to hear what other advice do you have for us political entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their reach globally?

Juri Schnöller:

Yeah, so one thing I can say is I think the most important thing is don't just come over if the parachute to jump down and try to implement what worked in the US and say, Look, this is gonna be happening here that I think won't work. But I do say that I think what's mostly appreciated that everyone knows American campaign professionals are very hardworking and they really cut down to chase what's needed and what's required in terms of capacity building to actually execute a campaign. And I think that's one advice in terms of overall business opportunities, especially in Europe, that most campaign HQs in terms of political parties, but also other potential larger civic movements. If you're on the progressive side, like labor unions are still a huge thing in Europe and are definitely in terms of their spending and in terms of their mobilization ability a big player it all comes down then to the point are you able to support with your consulting or with your tech or whatever special campaign ability you might bring to improve and scale the output efficiency in messaging and narrative shaping, but also in skills of the political parties.

And that's where I think it's definitely a huge sweet spot for any campaign professional that is able to understand and shape the logic of a multi-party system where of course, as again said earlier, not the main focus is email list building, but it's more about the creative aspect of content and also the ability to build organizational capabilities that shape and are adjusted to the digitization of political communications. And I think that will be a huge focus, at least what we see with our clients. But across Europe that is going to increase in the coming months and years because the boomers are about to retire. And a new generation of political operatives in parliament politicians

Eric Wilson:

Maybe in Europe, but we were gonna have the boomers for a while in the United States, <laugh> least

Juri Schnöller:

Politics. We see a younger generation taking over into Parliaments now across many spheres. And I think they're much more open to digital innovation and new approaches. And the previous one,

Eric Wilson:

You're listening to the Business of Politics Show, I'm speaking with Yuri co-founder of Cosmas and Kings You founded Cosmas and Kings, which a great name, and I'll let you tell the story about that back in 2016 as Germany's first digital political communications agency. What was your biggest hurdle there for convincing the parties, the stakeholders, that this was worth investing their time and resources into?

Juri Schnöller:

Honestly, looking back, it's hard to imagine for an American listener of course, but when we started in two 16 there was nearly no organization that spend a vast amount of their budget towards digital. Most social channels were still run by junior professionals or if they were run, they were all the same. So no specific platform messaging. So you used the same for Facebook, for Instagram, for whatever you had. There was no really custom messaging towards specific target groups. And when we get in, it was hard to convince people of course, but then Trump happened to election, the UK had Brexit and populous movements were gaining traction all over Europe. And suddenly of course the question came back, okay, what is this new digital battlefield of persuasion and shaping minds in the public arena? And then more and more, let's say organizations started to realize, okay, we need to invest in capabilities and we need to invest in building platforms that actually are able to reach and persuade people. And that just took some time to make those people aware that this is a change that's not going back to the old fashioned way of communication.

Eric Wilson:

And now eight years on, it's going well.

Juri Schnöller:

Yeah, we are now 60 people, as you said, we're the market leader in digital political communication. Of course, there are various social media agencies and agencies that do a large chunk of political communication and are larger than us, but we only do digital politics communication in the public sphere and do nothing else. And that's what we are very proud of. We're independent, we don't belong to any agency network. We are able to pursue our mission to support also smaller organization NGOs, unions, we're nonpartisan. That's also what we are very proud of. So we do work with conservatives, with liberal, with progressives, with greens excluding the far right in Germany. And for us, that's very important because we ultimately believe, as long as we support and empower, let's say, democratic actors that we help in building a democratic debate on social media that ultimately benefits of course the public discourse and getting the best results for voters to make their decisions.

Eric Wilson:

You and I have worked together creating a lot of content over the years, explain for our listeners how content marketing fits into your overall business strategy, because I think that's something that we don't do enough of here in the United States. And I just wanna hear from you why it's so important and the results that you see from that.

Juri Schnöller:

So I think what what's really important as a service provider is to showcase that you yourself have values. Especially, I mean, as you know, we are operating in a field where I would say probably some sleazy card salesmen are lower than US <laugh>, but not many jobs have probably a lower reputation than being a consultant in shady politics. Maybe politicians themselves, I would say <laugh> probably have a lower overall reputation and job recognition. No in all honesty, I think that it's really important to demonstrate that we are not this kind of Cambridge Analytica shady data guys that try to manipulate the public, but that we also do have a value based position that is really important for us to pick clients and to demonstrate it outside. So what we do with our content strategy, we organize and host events. Like tomorrow for instance we're having a large event at our office with some people from the German military talking about Russian death information, where we get a lot of people from the public sector, from business and discuss what is needed to defend democracy and the digital sphere and everything connected around our main narrative hosting events more, not just talking about us, but talking about the issues.

I wrote a book called Public Arena Playbook where we try to empower, especially smaller scale campaigns and candidates that run for office with the tools they need to execute digital campaigns, but they could never afford to hire an agency like us. So all that is connected to our main mission and it's is greatly appreciated because it helps you. And I think that's something for American listeners, not just talking about how great your product is, but talk about what solutions are needed in the field we operated, and then potentially also bring other player, other perspectives at the table. And that helps you becoming yourself a relevant actor in the market you're trying to shape.

Eric Wilson:

And one of those solutions that you've brought forward is cv, which is a software platform that helps elected officials and candidates in Germany use social media more effectively. What have you learned from that process of building software? Cause that's different than your agency work?

Juri Schnöller:

Yes, definitely. We had the realization, especially in social media campaigning, that we needed something to help the individual candidate of a political party because they usually are not able to use the Facebook business manager as well as potential specialists and campaign executives. And for us, that helped to create a tool that basically gives you the ability to save the favorite target groups for your constituency, for your election district, and then create content templates within a couple of clicks make yourself a quote and that you can adapt to the overall ci, which we mentioned earlier is really important and crucial to the political party.

Eric Wilson:

Sorry, what was that acronym again? Ci?

Juri Schnöller:

Corporate identity. Just Corporate

Eric Wilson:

Identity, okay. That's not something we talk about much.

Juri Schnöller:

See, that's a good <laugh>. No, so overall, yeah, just adapting to the, what I'd say party identity visuals. And for us, of course there was a huge challenge. We also had support, of course from an external developing agency because as a digital agency you have the problem of the innovators dilemma that of course creating a tool all by yourself is hardly doable when you're focused every day on servicing your clients. So we needed to create a completely separate innovation stream with externals that helped us shaping that. We kind of then founded our own company around Ativ. And yeah, it's been used now by over 800 politicians in Germany and it showed us that there was a specific need. We are still working out, of course, how to monetize it properly because again, there's not a lot of money especially on the smaller tickets in races in Germany, but I'm very confident that by next year be on a good track to develop it further.

Eric Wilson:

Well, what else could American campaigners learn from our European counterparts?

Juri Schnöller:

That's a good point. I would say that overall it's worth looking to Europe when it comes to, as you said earlier, to the overall visual identity and the usage of dialogue formats in voter contact. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in Scandinavia. Sweden is a great example. Parties are pretty advanced with our Mars using great storytelling and great narrative building. But even on smaller and local MPS candidates, but also mayors, if you take the mayor of London or of Poland Raki, there is a loads of people that are really using social media in a very innovative way. And I think when I look to the pages of most senators and Congress people, there's still a lot of innovation potential for that. So I would say for any campaign professional, if you have the time and ability from time to time check out like for instance, and Denmark, we just said elections yesterday.

Even if you don't speak the language, honestly, just scroll through the feeds of the parties, you will see a lot of interesting stuff that can be easily adapted and that can be easily copied. And because since that is the main focus of most of our work anyways creating potential dialogue formats, I think that's something you definitely can look into. And secondly also the way our, let's say our party system tries to find compromise. And one thing that I found astonishing was just in ad Danish election that I saw candidates of rival parties discussing under on Facebook channel and under on Instagram channel with an candidate from the other side. And I think all kind of formats that enable for us listeners to bridge not party gaps at the end, who you're voting for, but potentially seeing, look, we're all citizens in the same country and we need to work together no matter the outcome of the election.

Eric Wilson:

I'd like to thank Yuri for joining us today for a great conversation. You can learn more about him at his website, and I'll also link to Cosma and Kings and Civical in our show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, all that we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. And the bonus for you is that you look smart in the process as well. So remember to subscribe to the Business of Politics Show wherever you get your podcasts. You can also sign up at business of politics podcast.com to get email updates from the show. And with that, I'll say thank you and we'll see you next time.

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